Green Party's Nader Is Best Choice

October 02, 2000|The Morning Call

To the Editor:

In this election, both the Democratic and Republican candidates bring much hot air to sugar in the spinning of cotton candy -- visions of a budget surplus, real or imagined. Both men compete for the affections of the swing voter whose expectations of democratic politics are very low. Their actions make one position clear, however: Both abide the pollution of money in politics, which, like lead, slowly poisons the political environment and kills a democracy at its roots. Not surprisingly, many orthodox liberals fall in line with a predictable lesser-of-two evils mantra that holds them hostage to the evil of two lessers.

Seen with a cold eye, the party of hope, as the Democratic Party was once properly called, is no longer an opposition party. Rather, it is a redundant appositive, reactive even in its initiatives. For a variety of reasons, it is a party that became habituated to the lesser of two evils as a strategy, a habit of mind that lowers expectations to an enervating entropy. The surrender of the Democratic Party to the agenda of unbridled markets and the corruption of money in politics that comes with it mutually exclude many of its natural constituents, ordinary citizens like myself, from any reason to participate, even in voting. Against organized money in either party, I always lose.

An election is more than just winning. It is public trust beyond the fleeting popularity of a candidate. Adlai Stevenson once said that it is not enough to win an election; the candidate should and must deserve to win. I believe the Democratic candidate does not deserve my vote, and I will not throw it away in hopes of winning what is not worth having: an election without trust.

Ralph Nader and the Green Party are the alternative to self-imposed abdication from the ballot box. The Green agenda is a restatement of the fundaments of democratic politics, and it includes a sharp knife for the cancer of American representative democracy -- a disease euphemistically described as campaign finance. At the least, I will vote positively in the fall. The lesser of two evils is a vortex in the Bermuda triangle of apathy, ignorance and cynicism. My small boat will not sail there -- not this time.